Another candidate for Secretary of State in a Carter Administration (in the event,

he became National Security Advisor and Cyrus Vance became Secretary of State) gives for the third time on Firing Line his pungent, deeply informed view of the world, on subjects this time ranging from the death of Mao Tse-tung to the trade-union movement in the United States, from the relations between the First and Third Worlds to the upward mobility of different ethnic groups in the United States. ZB: "If you go beyond simple events, simple facts, the process of defining what reality is becomes enormously complex. Now, we can state as a proposition, assuming we know the facts, that very recently Mao Tse-tung died. And if we have access to information we can say exactly when he died. That's presumably an uncontestable fact, although even sometimes that can be contested. But beyond that, when you begin to assess what this means for the

Chinese regime, what its implications are, even before you move into prescriptions, your assessment of that reality becomes inherently more difficult and invariably more subjective."